What Is This Class???

HES 505 Fall 2025: Session 1

Matt Williamson

Introductions

About Me

  • What I do

  • My path to this point

  • Why I teach this course

What is geography

  • Geo: land, earth, terrain

  • Graph: writing, discourse

  • Tuan: Space (extent) and Place (location)

  • Analysis of the effects of extent and location on events or features

Five Themes in Geography

  • Location

  • Place

  • Region

  • Movement

  • Human-Environment Interaction

WGBH Educational Foundation

Location

The place (on Earth) of a particular geographic feature

Place

What is a location like?

Forest cover map by Robert Simmons via Wikimedia Commons

Region

What attributes to different geographies share? What distinguishes them?

Movement

How do genes, individuals, populations, ideas, goods, etc traverse the landscape.

LandGrab maps courtesy of High Country News

Human-Environment Interactions

How do people relate to and change the physical world to meet their needs?

Smoke map courtesy of Capital Public Radio; Nightlights courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.

Towards quantitative spatial analysis

‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.
Waldo Tobler

3 “Faces” of Analysis

Description

  • Coordinates
  • Distances
  • Neighbors
  • Summary statistics
  • Range Maps
  • Hotspots
  • Indices

Explanation and Inference

  • Cognitive Description: collection ordering and classification of data

  • Cause and Effect: design-based or model-based testing of the factors that give rise to geographic distributions

  • Systems Analysis: describes the entire complex set of interactions that structure an activity

Prediction

  • Extend description or explanation into unmeasured space
  • Stationarity: the rules governing a process do not drift over space-time

Class Details

Assignments

Check out the syllabus for more on grading!

  • Self-reflections (2x)
    • Your goals for the course
    • Evaluation criteria
  • In-class exercises (30x)
    • Problem solving
    • Reproducible workflows
    • Muscle memory
  • Homework Assignments (5x)
    • Integrate skills from the section
    • Practice visualization
    • Build version control habits
  • Code Revisions (5x)
    • Common issues
    • More extensive feedback
  • Final project (1st draft, final draft): Practice a full analysis workflow; Integrate analysis & visuals to tell a story

Wrapup

Checking in

  1. What can I clarify about the course?